Since discovering the “WordPress Automatic Upgrade“-plugin for WordPress, I finally was happy with upgrading quickly to the many new versions as they are released… It’s a highly recommended plugin, since it makes this complicated and scary backup/update operation easy as pie.

So when they announced the 2.3 version of WordPress on September 25th, I dutifully did the upgrade. Everything went fine, except for one thing: as a result of this upgrade, my permalink structure is broken.

Unfortunately my webhost Yahoo doesn’t support the use of .htaccess files on the server (the normal way wordpress-installations do their mod_rewrite-magic). To have their customers still enjoy friendly permalinks, they distributed a plugin. And that plugin fails miserably in 2.3 as one of the novelties of this new version is “a feature we call canonical URLs which does things like enforce your no-www preference, redirect posts with changed slugs so a link never goes bad, redirect URLs that get cut off in emails on similar to the correct post, and much more.”

On the scale of the universe, this is of course close to nothing. On the scale of this blog, it is of a magnitude the scale of an reasonable earthquake. You see: permalinks are meant to be permanent, and changing them amounts to starting a new blog from scratch: most of your incoming links are null and void and will vanish in a few weeks.